Types of Access Policies

Abbey supports 3 types of policies:

• Allow or Deny Access

• Expire Access

• Skip a Workflow Step

Allow or Deny Access

Policies which allow or deny access to a user can be specified in the policies field of a Grant Kit. For example:

resource "abbey_grant_kit" "abbey_example_kit" {
  name = "Abbey_Example"
  description = <<-EOT
    Grants access to Abbey's Demo Page.
  EOT

  workflow = {
    steps = [
      {
        reviewers = {
          one_of = ["[e-mail]"]
        }
      }
    ]
  }

  policies = [
    { bundle = "github://example-org/example-repo/policies" }
  ]

  output = ...
  }
}

Look at the policies field. The policy bundle specified must pass or Access Requests to this Grant Kit are denied. Policies used this way must use an allow variable such as below.

allow[msg] {
  in_group("Marketing")
  msg := "allow marketing folks"
}

If attributes about a user change and make the policy invalid, then the policy access will be revoked. For example, if a user was granted access in the above policy and then gets moved out of the "Marketing" group, Abbey will revoke access.

Expire Access

Abbey continues to check if policies for a given Access Request are valid. This can let you write access policies which expire access after a certain amount of time. Expiry based policies are also written in an allow Rego variable.

import data.abbey.functions

allow[msg] {
    functions.expire_after("60m")
    msg := "granting access for 60 minutes"
}

The above policy will allow access for 60 minutes, and then fail after 60 minutes. The failure will revoke access.

Skip a Workflow Step

You can also use policies to skip Workflow steps. Look at the following example.

resource "abbey_grant_kit" "abbey_example_kit" {
  name = "Abbey_Example"
  description = <<-EOT
    Grants access to Abbey's Demo Page.
  EOT

  workflow = {
    steps = [
      {
        reviewers = {
          one_of = ["[e-mail]"]
        }
        
        skip_if = [
          { bundle = "github://example-org/example-repo/policies/rbac" }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }

  policies = ...

  output = ...
  }
}

In the example, a review is required from [e-mail] to grant access through this Grant Kit. The review step may be skipped if the policy referred to in the skip_if section passes.

Policies given in a skip_if section must be placed in a skip variable such as below.

skip[msg] {
  in_group("Engineering")
  msg := "skipping review step for engineers"
}